Post 152.  

This week, I read the chapter, Beauty, in the 1952 edition of Brittanica’s Syntopicon, a collection designed by Mortimer Adler and Robert Hutchins at the University of Chicago for a collection called “The Great Books of the Western World.” The idea of a syntopicon, or a collection of topics, is distinctive to Brittanica’s project, though consistent with the ideas of encyclopedias and dictionaries, and is similar with more modern keywords projects, such as books by Raymond Williams, Cary Nelson, Stephen Watt, Evelyn Fox Keller and Elisabeth Lloyd in disciplines like culture, higher education, and evolutionary biology. The syntopicon offers a broad introduction of 100 keywords that are central to Western thought, from the perspective of Western philosophy and literature. Any criticisms more recent scholars pose to eurocentric and androcentric scholarly writing will necessarily be relevant to the Syntopicon, and with that in mind, Syntopicon entries can provide a base understanding of one intellectual tradition’s established understanding of a keyword—in this case, beauty. 

            Beauty is discussed with two other keywords, truth and goodness, but where truth and goodness are most often argued as being objective, beauty is widely, though not univocally, regarded as subjective in the Western intellectual tradition. Some authors, such as William James, have argued for an objective understanding of beauty, while others, such as Immanuel Kant, suggest beauty is a subjective but universal concept. Truth, goodness and beauty together make up the essential transcendentals of the Western tradition. As such, truth, goodness and beauty transcend the material world—you cannot touch or smell or hear truth itself, goodness itself, or beauty itself, but you are able to use these transcendentals as standards by which to judge true things, good things, and beautiful things as true, good, or beautiful. Plato would suggest these are primary ideas that transcend material reality. This idea can be found throughout Western history.

Daniel J. Shevock 

Link to the image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Great_Books.jpg

Post 151. 

This watch, I read the explanation of the Parable of the Sower in the gospel of Mark. In it, the Word is the seed, and we are the soil in which the seed lands. Satan, stealing hope and instigating despair, whispers to me that I am the rocky soil, and that in me the Word is received with joy, but with tribulation and hope for earthly riches my Faith withers and dies. Satan is the prince of lies. This lie works because, despite my growing closer to the Word in my suffering—in my professional failure as an academic, my financial fragility, my oft fruitless workdays, my lack of distinction, and lately in my shoulder pain—I persist in cultivating my marriage with the Lord. Even on days when passion is weak, I have meditated upon scripture, prayed for divine help, and lived as if Christ walks with me.

            Comparison is the thief of joy. It’s an old saying, I suppose, for a reason: It holds truth. Comparison plans a seed of envy, increasing expectation for earthly riches. My expectation of earthly riches does not come in the form of money—certainly capital would be welcomed if the Lord sent it my way—but in earthly riches. Thomas Hardy’s last novel, Jude the Obscure, was originally titled the Simpletons. In it, the poor, rural Jude Fawley teaches himself Latin and some Greek and works hard to gain admittance to Christminster College, dreaming of becoming a scholar, a Doctor of Divinity, and maybe even a bishop. Hardy, the realistic and insightful author, never portrays Jude as faultless—in fact, his faults provide the novel with much of its deepest insights. Often readers of Hardy come to this novel with preconceptions, especially having read Hardy’s previous novels like Tess of the d’Urbervilles, where the pure and inherently noble Tess suffers misfortunes by an unjust society.

            In comparison, Jude is complicated. He misunderstands much of what he reads, is boastful and self-centered, is filled with self-pride and persistent melancholy that leads to worsening of his situation. But is this critique even fair? Does he really worsen his situation from a penniless, unwanted child through his study and hard work, even if he never gains admittance to Christminster, is terrible at relationships, and fails to reach the proverbial stars? One could argue that when you start in a ditch, even if you don’t fully drag yourself from it, you have made some headway in a life of imperfect effort.

            Some have suggested Jude is such a complex character—sometimes likeable but oft unpleasant—because Hardy modeled much of Jude on himself. Hardy was able to clutch the mirror of truth, holding it to himself and scrutinizing every defect and error while grasping only some of his virtues, and those with discernment into how even these are flawed. Many people who lack self-understanding, those today who are ignorant to original sin—at least their own—cannot empathize with Jude. When he, after pulling himself from being nobody, stands in a tavern reciting better than Christminster’s students, he exposes how the alma mater is nothing like the real mother Jude lived without. Hardy was right in changing the name of the novel from the Simpletons to Jude the Obscure, even if it places too much focus on one figure, Jude, and not enough to other interesting characters like Sue and Arabella. To call Jude, Sue, Arabella and the other simpletons, even in their most foolish, idiotic, and oafish instances, misses something important. We are these characters who scheme our successes, fail, hurt those we love most, compromise, and even in compromises fail, hate ourselves, and continue to push on, praying our efforts will one day be fruitful.

            Our efforts never bear fruit, particularly when we were born in a ditch and pull ourselves out. This is because there is an implicit Bible verse that unlocks the mystery of this novel, Ephesians 2:8-9. Paul admonishes Christians that grace is a gift from the Lord, and that we cannot boast about our works, because they cannot save us. Jude, however hard he works, will never overcome the fallen society into which he was born and brutally raised. It is deformed to instill the hope for a golden crown but offers the poor only tin. But never fear because consecrated to the Lord are the poor in spirit (Matthew 5:3). The Christian who was, like Jude, born poor and worked fruitlessly accepts failure in the social world, because it is infused with diabolical iniquities and seemingly beautiful vices.

            Through the grace of the Holy Spirit, hope in that which is undying can replace our defiled hope in acknowledgement, appreciation, and eminence. Love can replace defiled love. Goodness can replace defiled goodness. Truth can replace defiled truth. Beauty can replace defiled beauty. 

Daniel J. Shevock 

Link to the image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hardy_-_Jude_the_Obscure,_1896_(page_163_crop).jpg

Post 150. 

Within the Catholic intellectual tradition, Catholic music can be perceived as classist, which contrast with the motto of the current Church, “a church that is poor for the poor.” Pope Francis used this phrase in 2013, and this motto is embodied today in the work of the Society of St. Vincent De Paul with the poor and homeless, the Dismas Ministry in prisons, Pax Christi working to end nuclear proliferation, and many others. But this is not only a modern motto. The  Church founded the earliest hospitals in the 4th Century, the first schools in Europe in the 11th Century, and restricted the rights of slave owners through the Theodosian Code of 438, banning then widespread Roman practices of concubinage and rape, as well as protecting abandoned infants from this (https://droitromain.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/Codex_Theod.htm). 

            On the musical arts side of this paradox, Pope Pius XII wrote extensively on sacred music, including rejecting the “outworn dictum ‘art for art’s sake’,” confessing that music is the servant to sacred liturgy, that Gregorian chant ought to be upheld, and that an artist’s freedom ought to be “ennobled and perfected” by divine law. In his encyclical Musicae-Sacrae, the Church is cautioned “to protect sacred music against anything that might lessen its dignity,” and “take the greatest care to prevent whatever might be unbecoming to sacred worship or anything that might distract the faithful in attendance from lifting their minds up to God” (https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-xii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xii_enc_25121955_musicae-sacrae.html). 

            It seems that today three figures are revered uppermost: St. Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), acknowledged as the master of plainchant and as a doctor of the church, Giovanni da Palestrina (1525-1594), endorsed as perfecting Catholic polyphony, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791), conceivably the greatest genius of Catholic sacred music. Other Catholic composers, William Byrd, Monteverdi, Vivaldi, Haydn, Beethoven, List, Dvořák, Edward Elgar, and Olivier Messiaen, are the significant figures in Western Music history. These figures can dominate discussions of Catholic music, and, as a result, dominate our understanding of Beauty. However, the Catholic musical tradition isn’t limited to classical music. Jazz artists Mary Lou Williams, Dave Brubeck, and Vince Guaraldi each composed poignant masses. Rather than offering a strong contrast with the classical mass tradition, these jazz masses are more high art than common.

            Today, Catholic music using more popular stylistic elements are portrayed as contentious, while Classical musical forms are endorsed. This seemingly contrarian viewpoint might best be summed up in a recent post on the well-known website, Catholic Answers, in which old-fashioned standards like On Eagle’s Wings are described as “cheesy.” The post then produces of list of songs, calling for the elimination of these popular Christian songs from mass, which may not be unfounded (beside the point I am making here), and finally advocates that Gregorian chant “be given pride of place in liturgical services” (https://www.catholic.com/audio/cot/these-worship-songs-need-to-be-abolished). Whether or not one appreciates Gregorian chant, or Renaissance polyphony upon those plainchants, and I certainly do, this is not the common music of the poor, who the Church aims to be.

            This is more the music of monarchs, capitalists, bishops, and the cathedrals in urbane cities than the music of the poor who might attend the small parishes serving the rural and urban poor. And therein lies the paradox, a church that is poor for the poor cannot be the church of the that is perfect for the perfect alone; that is cultured for the cultured alone; that is intelligent for the intelligent alone; or that is elite for the elites alone. A church that is poor for the poor, the church of St. Francis of Assisi, St. John Bosco, St. Teresa of Calcutta, St. Katharine Drexel, and Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker Movement, that fully serves the poorest of the poor by meeting them where they are, this church, must at times be poor in music.

Daniel J. Shevock

Link to image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mother_Teresa_by_Ariel_Quiroz_-_Portrait.jpg

Post 149. 

Beauty is imprinted on children as we first experience the world. An infant beholds the world in awe with untainted innocence. Children hold on to an enchanted environment through play, especially outdoors. Thinking back to my childhood, hours were engaged playacting with toys in the grass, watching the clouds form figures, or listening to birds, crickets, and the wind. I did not have an idyllic childhood, and basic needs were not always met, but innocent to the extensiveness of society’s depravity, I spent much of my time in oblivious awe. With age both innocence and awe degrade—the work of Satan in the world—and we gaze, feel, and listen deeply less to the beautiful things God has immersed us in, and attend more to the ugly.

            Gradually, children notice parents fighting and offensive language; schooldays filled with long hours indoors, testing regimes, discipline and failure; violence and drug addiction. Today children are distracted from awe by unwitting adults providing addictive technologies—the screen replaces the universe and the child’s senses are blunted. As these addicts age, they would prefer the simple numbness of videogames, social media, and artificial intelligence to experiences with other people or the natural world. People and nature are both complex, hazardous, and sometimes vicious. But they are also where living beauty is unearthed—in the thoughtful eye of a beloved, a song of waterfall deep in the wood, a hug, a pink sunset, or a discussion on a favorite old novel. All these things that bear awe in young children gradually vanish in the face of years spent living in the social world in which we find ourselves and later partake in. We learn to fear that which inspired awe and admire that which is simulated.

            A word I seldom write or speak, but which seems fitting in the context of awe is sublime. Simply stated in my understanding of it, the sublime refers to those great beautiful things that are both attractive and frightening. An example that was used when I first heard the term was the Grand Canyon, which I visited nearly a decade ago. Standing near the ledge—even if you’re ten feet from the ledge—a fear inserts itself your gut as you look at the vastness of God’s creation, knowing your own smallness. You are aware that a wind gust, if it had a fraction of the power of this canyon, could fling you to your death, not dissimilar to the fear of the bully that schoolchildren realize after being flung into a locker, choked, and given a bloody lip for the first time or, to use a contemporary example, finding lies mixed with half-truths about you on classmates’ social media account receiving hundreds of likes. Here you are, tiny and powerless to do anything to stop your defenselessness. While there is no beauty in school bullying—an essential part of school which drives us away from awe—the sublime is both attractive and frightening. We want to behold with all our senses the breeze, the birdsong, the rock, the space of the canyon. We search for the river at the center and for animals in the distance. We move our attention from the vast to the minuscule and back again. When I visited the canyon, this experience is disturbed by my wife admonishing me to back away from the ledge, perhaps not grasping I left ten feet between me and it. She is having the same experience further back.

            As people age, maybe we are less likely to spend hours in awe than in fear. The recipe of the sublime goes sour when we mix in too much fear. We fail to rise to the Beauty we might know.

Daniel J. Shevock 

Link to image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dicken%27s_works_(1890)_(14779159911).jpg

Post 148. 

This morning, I read St. Oscar Romero’s reflection from December 31, 1977 (published in The Violence of Love, Orbis Books), in which the good bishop explains why the Church resists torture and other abuses. He writes, “The church, entrusted with the earth’s glory, believes that in each person is the Creator’s image and that everyone who tramples it offends God,” and later in the same contemplation, “There is no dichotomy between man and God’s image.” 

            The question, Why Beauty, has a relative, Why Beauty Matters. For St. Oscar, Beauty exists for God’s purpose. In the 19th Century Romantic aestheticists argued effectively that art is for art’s sake—that is, Beauty is for Beauty. Immanuel Kant had previous argued for the intrinsic value of human beings because every person would want to be understood as intrinsically valuable—this is the categorical imperative, which is his extension of the golden rule. But what does this mean for art? Non-human beings (animals/plants) and objects exist not because they are intrinsically valuable, but because they have a purpose—they are of use value.

            This dichotomy, picked up by the Romantics, extended intrinsic value to certain arts, especially those found in museums, opera houses, and concert halls frequented by the nobility, aristocracy, and wealthy capitalists. These high arts become intrinsically valuable. The contradiction becomes obvious when we ponder that the same persons that in the 19th Century employed child labor and fought workplace safety laws, were aggressively negating the intrinsic value of other human persons, the working poor, while disseminating the intrinsic value of Beauty. This type of aesthetic theory found voice in 20th Century Music Education through the philosopher Bennett Reimer, who trained numerous music teachers and professors to begin from the position that music has intrinsic value, and insisted we teach music for music’s sake, rather than for any extrinsic ends, be those ends political, spiritual, economic, or social. 

            In response to the aesthetic movement, specific to Music Education, praxial philosophers such as David Elliott, Christopher Small, and Thomas Regelski dominated scholarly writing beginning in the 1990s. Praxialists argue that music is not a thing at all, but an action which people do. They reject the intrinsic/extrinsic dualism, and open space for today’s scholarship, which includes much that is political, spiritual, economic, and social. Both aesthetic and praxial music educators and scholars remain active today. 

            I was trained to be a music teacher in the 1990s, when the aesthetics/praxialist conversation was at its most heated, and earned my Ph.D. in 2015, firmly placing my scholarship in the praxial faction, which allowed me to research music improvisation and ecological literacy—topics which would be understood as extrinsic to music itself from the aesthetic perspective. More recently, my understanding of ecology has led me to my current enquiry into Beauty, an idea that tends to find greater expression in aesthetic theory than praxial. A synthesis is needed.

            The Christian perspective is something quite different than most conceptions of the aesthetic or the praxial. As St. Oscar revealed “There is no dichotomy between man and God’s image,” and if there is no dichotomy then intrinsic value does not lie there and not here—in art and not factory workers; in a sonata and not in a country hit; in the mental image of beauty and not in this mere performance, here. The aesthetic position as it has been argued in Music Education scholarship is vacuous because God says each person—the disabled, the homeless, the illegal alien, the trans, the cashier, as well as the business owner, the monastic, and the internationally recognized scholar--is the image of God. There is no dichotomy to be found because God, who is trinity—perfect relationship—has not chosen to dichotomize reality into those of his creation having intrinsic value and those having mere use value. Rather, ever creature of God has intrinsic value as well as use value, when we choose to put ourselves to the use of others in Christian love. The most beautiful lives have been the lives of saints—though often not lives filled with wealth, length, or lack of suffering. People are unfulfilled when we are not of use to our friends, family, neighbors, communities, and humanity—but we are unhappy when treated as less-than others of God’s creation and not given the time to explore with our bodies, minds and souls the beautiful things at within our grasp, whether in silence and solitude or together with others.

Daniel J. Shevock 

Link to the image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Beatificacion_Monse%C3%B1or_Romero_(17984373076).jpg 

Post 146.  
 
Unlike friendship, Love (caritas) is offered to friends and enemies alike (Matthew 5:44; Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica II, Question 23), which seems to share similarity with Beautying. When a band records a new album, a sculptor puts their work in a public square, or a crafter offers a bracelet on Etsy, their artwork would fail if it only drew interest from friends. But other acts of beauty—a lullaby, a campfire song, a blanket knitted for a new baby—are almost entirely contained within friendship. Friendship involves eye-to-eye conversations, help in times of need, common meals, shared experiences of all sorts; and is therefore a particular kind of love. Perhaps the deepest: But love is bigger than friendship. In love we may buy a meal for a destitute stranger or give to a global charity that feeds the hungry. For Catholics and many other Christians, love is enacted through what are called the Corporal Works of Mercy—feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless, visit the sick, visit the imprisoned, and bury the dead. These expressions of love cannot be limited to friendship—one must not only love those with whom they are friends. The Good Samaritan cared for the stranger, and so must we.

            Because we enact beauty from the limited consciousness of a human—we are not God—many of our beautiful acts have lives beyond our awareness. A painting may be discovered long after the painter’s death and find its way into an elite museum. My undergraduate music teacher professor, Vahe Barberian, worked extensively to produce performances of his deceased father’s symphonies. In the 21st Century, sometimes something as simple as singing Happy Birthday as a family might go viral, and touch millions of people’s lives—if only for an instant before they each swipe on. Like acts of love, the life and results of an act of beauty, given to a stranger are unknown by any but the Lord. Intention matters, likely more than results if only because results are beyond us, especially the omniscience needed to predict perfectly the results of any free act. 

            We enact beauty because God is perfect Beauty, the creator of Beauty—the cistern from which we draw our beautiful acts. To take the time to beauty is to have a certain kind of faith in the future—like planting a tree that will take a century to reach maturity, and may be cut down by someone else. Some musicians make money songwriting, but others live lives in obscurity, writing songs for some other reason. To create something beautiful and meaningful is to hope for relationship with both other people and something unknown and unknowable, the mysterious spiritual Being who is Beauty.

Daniel Shevock
 
Link to image (Jan Van Delen, Caritas): https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jan_Van_Delen,_Caritas_(1673-80),_KBS-FRB.jpg

Post 145.

Remind me to bring earplugs next time I write at Starbucks. Perhaps being a musician, or my tendencies toward the spectrum, is why I notice the obnoxiousness of today’s corporate spaces. Not only Starbucks. When I get gas at a Sheetz, I pay for the gas—my labor traded for ancient sunlight—and I also am forced to endure songs and advertisements blasted at an unpleasantly considerable volume-level. It feels like a breaking of the social contract. I pay for the gas; I don’t pay to be advertised at.

            Problem solved, today anyway. I asked the cashier to turn the volume down a little. I feel awkward and assertive making the request, but nobody else has walked in for the 15 minutes I have been here. Online, customers indicate that corporations use loud music to keep customers from lingering. What an odd purpose for a business model, especially for the coffee house, which was borne in the Enlightenment and nicknamed the ‘Penny University,’ and where scholars, artists, merchants, and poets gathered to read, write, talk, and share ideas. But, as is well documented on the political right and left here in the U.S.—capitalism ruins everything.

            Every business model has, at its core, a beautiful sowing—universities were founded to fulfill the medieval need to conserve the ancient intellectual tradition and to understand God in His created universe (university) and the activities of humankind. Public and parochial schools were established to increase public literacy, so that everyday people, and not only clergy and scholars, could read, especially scripture. Hospitals were instituted to care for and protect the lives of the ill and injured. Public housing projects to shelter the working homeless; police forces to protect the community; carpentry guilds/unions to erect beautiful buildings that everyday folk could not, such as cathedrals; and robotic technologies to lessen dangerous labor freeing people to attend plays, musical festivals, and to make their own arts and crafts. The list goes on, and all these institutions—when they grow long in the tooth—in capitalism risk losing sight of their beautiful purpose and reduce their existence to imprudent quarterly profits.

            Most academics would understand capitalist institutions’ loss of their beautiful purpose within the historical writings of Marx—and they wouldn’t be wrong to do so. However, I am going to suggest writers who are otherwise at each other’s throats have identified this same problem. Russell Kirk’s 4th Principle of Conservatism is prudence—which is indeed long-standing virtue in our Christian and Greco-Roman history. “Any public measure ought to be judged by its probable long-run consequences, not merely by temporary advantage or popularity.” https://kirkcenter.org/conservatism/ten-conservative-principles/ Most conservatives today might argue that many of these big businesses are private, when in fact the process of incorporation—a government policy—publicizes most especially large institutions, with their tendencies toward monopolization of markets. Rather than piecemeal argue against the squalor of modern public universities, schools, housing projects, and the like while ignoring the squalor of private gas stations and coffeehouses, I would rather apply this principle of prudence more consistently and generally.

            If a virtue is to truly be a virtue in the Christian sense, it is applied generally. Christians are not relativists. Prudence, the virtue of being as clever as serpents and as harmless as doves (Matthew 10:16), is the finem, or “end” of all moral virtues, according to Thomas Aquinas, directing human thoughts on all other virtues (https://aquinas.cc/la/en/~ST.II-II.Q47.A6). Rash, inconsiderate and fickle people often lack prudence while cunning and anxious people have a distorted sense of prudence. I would argue prudence also guides the human understanding of Beautying.

            Prudent beauty is not a new idea. Medieval schools aimed to nurture harmonious people, the vir perfectus, through study of music as one of seven liberal arts. The ideal music was neither too harsh nor too timid; neither too loud nor too soft; neither too ignorable nor too striking. So too the harmonious people medieval schools taught (https://archive.org/details/didascaliconmedi00hugh). Today we may know more musical genres and have instant access, online, to more cultures’ folksongs, symphonies, improvisations, mantras, stories, raps, ragas and tunes, but a general application of prudence—fit within each culture’s ideal musical expression—can guide many assessments of the human formations of Beautying. I find, as I write this, I want to avoid falling into the trap of 20th Century aesthetic theory, which placed Western musics above non-Western musics, and classical musics above popular musics. I have no intention of flipping the pyramid on its head either, but rather appreciating all musics within context, and understanding that they are, in some way, an expression of that trinitarian reality impressed upon the whole universe (https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2021/entries/bonaventure/). Beautying is prudent to the extent that all relationships best reflect prudence.
          
 ds 
  
Link to image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:12_La_Prudence_-_H._Pussey_Grand_Etteilla_Tarot_Deck.jpg 

Post 144.  

Often, I awaken and observe a watch in the night by studying the bible. Last night, I read Psalm 137, the beginning of which is known through the song, “Rivers of Babylon.” The psalms express the full range of human emotion—our full internal life. Good and bad. God knows it all—and there’s no reason to hide the truth of our thoughts. The psalm vividly takes us to Babylon, where in despair a musician reflects on the brutality his people have received from their Babylonian captors. Enslaved, the psalmist sorrows at being forced to sing cheerily for his slavers as they dance, eat, drink, and celebrate their victory over Jerusalem. “How could we sing a song of the Lord in a foreign land?” (Psalm 137:4).

            The psalmist then promises to always remember Jerusalem and curses himself if he would dare forget. Then the psalm turns dark. Perhaps the darkest moment in scripture, as he prays for Babylon’s desolation, and blesses whoever pays back Babylon for its destruction of Jerusalem. He prays, “Blessed the one who seizes your children and smashes them against the rock.” (Psalm 137:9). What a horrible thing to wish for. It is horrible also when we do this—and God sees our darkest hopes in us.  

            How bizarre it is to hear the German Reggae/Disco group Boney M’s 1978 cover of “Rivers of Babylon” become popular on TikTok and YouTube Shorts. Repeating only the first part of Psalm 137, and to upbeat-cheery rhythms, Boney M’s hit fails to plummet into the depths of despair voiced by the psalmist. And yet, there’s something in the paradoxical nature of it, a bubbly song in the shallowest of short-form internet rubbish with a finger pointing to a moment of earnest despair, hopelessness and misery. It could easily be dismissed as just another moment of postmodern audio- brain rot, but like any expression of beauty, even miscarried ones, the finger pointing is pointing toward Beautying. The involuntary cheerfulness of the psalmist expressed in trite baloney. Relationships are never perfect because people are never perfect, and even at our worse, any attempts can reveal Beauty—in all Beauty’s horror, false joy, and feeling.

DS 

Link to image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boney_M.#/media/File:Boney_M._(1977_Atlantic_Records_publicity_photo).jpg

Post 143. 

In the book of the prophet Jonah, God reveals His nature as Love. The Word speaks to Jonah, commanding him to speak words of forewarning to the Ninevites. Jonah, the devout Hebrew prophet, flees by boat toward Spain, at the remotest reaches of the known world. Why does he seek to escape the Lord? Jonah knows the Lord’s power, and that He is the single God who is actual. The Word then walking with Jonah is the God who walked with Adam in the Garden of Delight; who warned Noah to build and vessel; who gave Sarah a son when she was 90; who led the slaves out of Egypt, parted the Sea of Reeds, and fed them manna in the wilderness. Jonah, then, knew not only of the Lord’s power, but of His mercy. This is what he feared.

            In the 8th Century, BC, Nineveh was a large city in the Assyrian Empire, which had decimated the Kingdom of Israel, killed and tortured many, and captured all the educated and strong youth. Assyria was known for being cruel, devising what would become the foulest and most notorious mode of torture: crucifixion. Jonah lived in the Northern Kingdom, in the town of Gath-hepher, about two miles from what would become Nazareth. Jonah likely had family members who were killed, tortured, and taken into slavery. When the Word came to Jonah he knew of God’s oneness, of his strength, and of his clemency. It is clemency that vexed Jonah most, and he absconded from his homeland and the Lord.

            In his flight Jonah experienced God’s power over the sea, being forced to admit that the God of the Hebrews was Lord of the land and sea. Unnamed sailors were converted and offered worship to the one God as they reluctantly threw Jonah overboard. Jonah, consumed by a large fish, was taken to the depth of the sea—to Hades itself—and prayed that he would once again be allowed to be in the presence of God. After three days, Jonah was expelled onto the shoreline where the Word returned to him and commanded him again to prophesize to the Ninevites. He reluctantly did so, offering Ninevah the shortest prophecy shared in scripture: “Forty days more and Ninevah shall be overthrown” (Jonah 3:4).

            I say these eight words aloud. Were they spoken in a soft or loud tone? With abruptness or with gentle lovingkindness? Did Jonah speak to them dryly with a shade of joy, eager for Ninevah’s destruction and taking pleasure in it? This seems most likely, by what follows. Jonah retreats beyond the walls to await the city’s annihilation, rightful vengeance for the atrocities Assyria committed on Jonah’s nation, family, and friends. But the Assyrians pronounce a fast and repent of their many sins. In response, God relents, and shows mercy, just as Jonah dreaded He might. Jonah, the unwilling prophet, stews in his tent. Does God withdraw his lovingkindness from Jonah, this obstinate prophet? No, he educates Jonah, explaining that he loves the humans and animals that live in Nineveh. They too are His, just as the sailors are, and as Jonah is. Rather than retribution, He wants a relationship with them.

            Who is this God that is one, all powerful, sends his Word to his prophets, and who relents? Relenting is typical of loving relationships. My son asks to go bowling and I say no. Later he asks again and I relent. Do perfect fathers relent? Evidently. Many centuries would pass before this paradoxical question had a theological answer—the Trinity. The word—Trinity—is not penned in scripture, and yet, read in light of the Trinity, some of the most paradoxical scriptural episodes become less paradoxical. How is the face of God something humans cannot see (Exodus 33:20), and yet Adam and Noah and Abraham and Moses all walk and talk with Him? The Word of the Lord comes to all the prophets. For early Christians wrestling with the divinity of Jesus, most explicitly in the Johannine books of the bible, the Word is in some way God, but in some way a separate person. So too, the Spirit is a separate person, unified as part of the same God. God is one, God is three. Trinity. From the dawn of being, the Trinity was—three persons in loving relationship. For an internally loving God, God does not require our relationship to be perfected—He is not missing relationship, only to get it through his creation—but rather clemency is internal to God. Herein lies truth to the nature of Beauty, in God’s transcendent relenting. Beauty is never experienced except through relationship—an artist colony, a punk band meeting in a garage, a father walking with his teenager through a museum pointing out his favorite paintings, a DJ and an MC responding to each other’s improvised ideas, a child cooking a cake for the first time with their parents, a singer responding to an audience, a grandma crocheting a scarf for her grandchild, a congregation intoning psalms together, a barber discussing baseball while trimming an old friend’s hair, or a mother singing lullabies to her babe in a rocking chair. Every experience of beauty in this world is internally a relationship—so it would be inconceivable to imagine transcendent Beauty as lacking this essential characteristic of beauty-in-specific. Relationship.

DS 

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